One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This

Hardcover, 208 pages

English language

Published Feb. 25, 2025 by Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group.

ISBN:
978-0-593-80415-5
Copied ISBN!
(12 reviews)

On October 25, 2023, after just three weeks of the bombardment of Gaza, Omar El Akkad put out a tweet: “One day, when it’s safe, when there’s no personal downside to calling a thing what it is, when it’s too late to hold anyone accountable, everyone will have always been against this.” This tweet has been viewed more than 10 million times.

As an immigrant who came to the West, El Akkad believed that it promised freedom. A place of justice for all. But in the past twenty years, reporting on the War on Terror, Ferguson, climate change, Black Lives Matter protests, and more, and watching the unmitigated slaughter in Gaza, El Akkad has come to the conclusion that much of what the West promises is a lie. That there will always be entire groups of human beings it has never intended to treat as fully human—not just Arabs or …

2 editions

"there is no terrible thing coming for you in some distant future...a terrible thing is happening to you now"

No rating

Another brutal but necessary book about a genocide happening in front of our faces. At first glance, the title might suggest a future reckoning, but Omar El Akkad is insistent on demonstrating what is happening to the world now. It will be reckoned with in the future, but that does not lessen the impact today, on Gaza and on those who are allowing it to happen.

"It is difficult to live in [the U.S.] in this moment and not come to the conclusion that the principal concern of the modern American liberal is, at all times, not what one does or believes or supports or opposes, but what one is seen to be." (117)

Searing

Written with absolute moral clarity, the argument here is searing, precise, and visceral. While I don't know how to make people care either, the immediacy of the author's writing goes a long way towards bringing this genocide, these atrocities and abuses of human life at the hands of empire, home. He makes the unimaginable imaginable, but does not dilute the horror in the process. These are true atrocities, and the claim made in the book's title is obviously correct. I will be thinking about some of the passages here - which aren't just passages, of course, they're real things that happened to real people - for the rest of my life. I should. We all should. I wish I could force everyone to read this.

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Subjects

  • Western Supremacy, colonialism, Palestine, Occupation

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